Mike Connell: Glory in the depths of winter

Jan. 27, 2013

Mike Connell

In our corner of Michigan, the last 10 days of January are, on average, the coldest of the year.

This is mid-winter as measured by meteorology if not the calendar. For the next six months, average daily temperatures will ascend gradually, peaking in the sultry days of late July.

When it comes to seasons of the year, I have an equitable nature. I pretty much like them all, even Michigan’s mud season, if only because it justifies an annual expedition to Florida in pursuit of baseball and beaches.

Still, if forced to choose, I might pick the depths of winter as my favorite time of the year.

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TWICE IN THE PAST WEEK, I have walked for three or four hours at a time along the bluffs and into the ravines of the Port Huron State Game Area.

A week or more of subfreezing temperatures, including a spell of near-zero weather, has opened entry into places that would be inaccessible in another season. Cattail swamps and briar-lined ditches become pathways rather than impediments.

The Black River, actually a lake between Wingford Dam and the long-submerged ford where Metcalf Road once descended to the river, is a frozen highway, a shortcut between trails that were never meant to connect.

The ponds at the oxbow, carpeted with water lilies in late summer, are now encrusted with two feet of ice. You can walk up to the beaver houses and inquire if anyone is home.

On the bluffs above the oxbow, looking out on those albescent ponds and snow-floured pines, it is as if the world had been remade in crystal. A few bronzed leaves, vestiges of the bosky summer, cling to the beech saplings and provide a touch of contrast to the pale.

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IT HAS BEEN 101 YEARS since timber barons felled the last great stand of virgin white pine and white oak in St. Clair County.

Charles Keene “Posy” Dodge, a Port Huron lawyer who moonlighted as a botanist, marked the occasion by lamenting the loss of wilderness and proposing a “public reservation” in Beards Hills where the Black River accepts its largest tributary, Mill Creek.

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“Such a place left to itself for a number of years and under intelligent management,” Dodge wrote, “would not only be a benefit to ourselves, but to our successors, a sight worth seeing by lovers of nature, a place where the scarlet tanager, one of the most beautiful of our feathered tribes, and other birds beneficial to man, could feed, nest, fly and flit about from tree to tree in peace, where the woodcock could raise her young unmolested by the hunter and his dog, where the partridge could drum at will, and all living things enjoy fully their share of life.”

Dodge’s proposal for a protected wilderness of 3,000 to 4,000 acres went nowhere, but 16 years later — in 1928 — a tycoon named Emory Ford built a magnificent hunting lodge on a hillside overlooking the Black River.

The Great Depression began the following year, and struggling farmers found an eager buyer in Ford. He eventually acquired nearly 4,000 acres along the river in northern Clyde Township.

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THE FORD ESTATE is well-known locally, and many people assume a connection with those other Fords — Henry and his progeny.

In fact, Emory and Henry shared a name and great wealth, but no blood ties.

Emory’s dad, John Baptiste Ford, was born in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1811, making him two years younger than a more famous child of Kentucky’s log-cabin era, Abraham Lincoln.

The elder Ford, known as “Capt. Ford” because he dabbled in shipbuilding, eventually landed in Wyandotte, where he took a job with Eureka Iron Works. This was among the many enterprises founded by Michigan’s first great industrialist, Eber Brock Ward, the son of a Fort Gratiot lighthouse keeper.

After making a fortune or two, and squandering them, the captain woke up one morning and found himself 70 years old and broke. What should a man do?

Seeing no better alternative, he went out and made another fortune.

He and his eldest son, Emory, made a connection between three things — the salt beds beneath the Detroit River, soda ash and glass making. They became plate-glass pioneers, founding companies such as Pittsburgh Plate Glass and Libbey-Owens-Ford.

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AN ARDENT SPORTSMAN, Emory Ford dammed the Black River, creating a four-mile-long pool as habitat for ducks, fish and other tasty things. He drowned the Metcalf ford in the process.

On Oct. 4, 1942, not quite a year after Pearl Harbor, the state paid $87,000 to buy 3,000 acres of the Ford estate. The hunting lodge, the dam and 736 acres stayed in private hands, as they remain today.

The 3,000 acres formed the core of the game lands, which the state more than doubled in size with additional land purchases. Today, the Port Huron State Game Area covers roughly 8 square miles of Clyde Township and another two square miles of Grant Township. It is larger than its namesake city.

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A RETIRED MORTARMAN and his grandson were fishing on the lower of the two ponds near the corner of Metcalf and Gibbons roads.

When I stopped to chat, they described the fishing as mediocre. Three or four years ago, winter kill struck hard in what had been a fine place to catch a bass supper.

We were discussing the thickness of the ice when the old soldier nodded toward the tool he had used to carve out his fishing hole. “That’s a 2-foot auger,” he said, “and I needed every inch of it.”

I found the news reassuring. I venture onto frozen ponds and streams with an old man’s caution, and with vivid memories of what it feels like to trudge home with a bootful of ice water.

Enjoying winter does not make me a fan of cold. During a walk in the winter woods, I am invariably warmer than I would have been had I stayed in my chair with a book. It’s all about dressing: two pairs of wool socks, two pairs of pants, two pairs of gloves, four or more layers of clothing for the body’s core, a snug hat, a scarf, boots, ice cleats, a dollop of lip balm.

Every home should have a furnace as efficient as the one inside us. Within fifteen minutes of walking, I’m toasty warm. Plus, I could fall down and feel nothing.

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WINTER IS A TIME of discovery in the woods. If the access to wetlands is a doorway, the absence of foliage is a window.

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Following a game trail requires no particular skill when there are tracks in the snow. In midsummer, Alberta cowboy Terry Grant, the original “Mantracker” of Canadian television — and how could his producer fire him? — might struggle to follow the abandoned logging roads and ancient buggy lanes that crisscross the forest. In winter, even I can make them out.

Along with deer and coyote, turkey and eagles, there is history to be stalked in these woods.

In 1847, Michigan became the first place in the Western world to outlaw the death penalty. The stage for this had been set two decades earlier by Thomas Knapp, the sheriff of Wayne County, who as a matter of conscience chose to resign his office rather than to carry out the hanging of a convicted murderer.

Knapp left Detroit in 1828 and moved into the wilderness, where he built a cabin and a mill on the Black River and became the first white settler of what is now Grant Township.

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BETWEEN MINDEN BOG and Clyde Township’s northern boundary, the Black River flows more or less due south, in a meandering way, its path to Lake Huron blocked by the moraine left behind 12,800 years ago with the retreat of the leading edge of a two-mile-high ice sheet.

Just below the old Metcalf ford, the river nearly punched its way into Mill Creek’s watershed before it was turned back, forming a wide loop as it found an opening to the east.

In one flood or another, the river dug a shortcut that eliminated the loop, or oxbow, where the Department of Natural Resources has built a pair of ponds favored by wild geese and beaver.

On a wide ledge midway between the river and the bluffs that overlook the oxbow, there is a grove of towering white pines. In another century or two, it may look as it did before all the chopping and sawing.

Entering the grove was like entering a cathedral, a silent place, a solemn place, a place for introspection. I dusted the snow from a fallen log and sipped water that had turned slushy with ice, knowing there must be a heaven because, if only for a moment, I had found it.